This evening I had the opportunity to join Philip Haddad, President of the Downtown Residents Association and John Sheridan, Co-Chair of the Downtown Windsor Farmers’ Market Volunteer Committee in presenting to Windsor City Council concerning the future of the Downtown Windsor Farmers’ Market.

We requested that Council consider funding some upgrades to the market site at the former bus depot (this was a request that originally went to the Capital Budge Committee in March 2010) or provide the market with a five year lease on the site which it could use to pursue funding from federal, provincial and private sources to restore the historic bus depot and improve the site to make it a beautiful and enduring community resource. (I’ve written before about why I feel so strongly that the former bus depot should be protected and preserved.)

There was a considerable amount of constructive debate about our proposal, and I was pleased to see that we’re now having an open discussion about the future of the market.

We were able to counter some lingering notions that granting a five year lease to the market would somehow prevent a major redevelopment project on the site. Unfortunately, or fortunately perhaps, the bus depot site sits directly over the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, so it can only be re-developed as a surface parking lot. We also countered the argument that allowing the lease would hinder the re-development of the armouries.  The former bus depot parking lot could be made available to whomever invests in the armouries at all times except when the market operates.  If anything, having a restored art deco building across the street would enhance the value of the armouries.

In the end, Council voted to defer a vote on the lease until its next meeting in three weeks time.

It has come down to a choice between continuing to support a successful venture that Windsor and Essex County residents are enjoying and allowing the Downtown Residents Association to pursue external funding that would significantly improve a civic asset, potentially at no cost to city taxpayers, or, requiring the market to move to a less amenable location, spending money to make that site work, losing another heritage building and putting the market’s momentum at risk.

If you agree that the choice is obvious, please contact your city councillor, or sign up as a delegate when the item comes to Council again for a vote.

On Wednesday, June 16 I attended an open house to commerate the closing of my elementary school, St. Francis, at 477 Detroit Street in Old Sandwich Town. There has been a school of some sort on the site for the past 109 years. The organizers put an incredible amount of work into the event, gathering peoples’ memories of the school, feeding everyone and even setting up detailed historic exhibits.  I spent about twenty minutes poring over the attendance lists of some of the turn of the 20th century classes. Line after line of Robinets and Drouillards; Parents and Ouellettes. Thank you to everyone who contributed the event.

I have very fond memories of my time at the school. We were blessed with excellent teachers and I was fortunate enough to live close enough to see the front entrance through my bedroom window.

Unfortunately, the privilege of living near a neighbourhood school is becoming more and more rare in Windsor’s West End, which, to put it plainly, is becoming a school desert. As of this fall, only St. Johns and St. James will serve this large geographic area for the separate school system.

The public board has been more successful at maintaining a presence, but there are neighbourhoods that are now very far from any public elementary or secondary schools. The futures of Benson Elementary school and Forster Secondary are uncertain and enrollment figures across the city are decreasing.

The consequences of school closings for neighbourhoods are significant. The families of school orphaned students often move out of the area, and future families are less likely to purchase a home. Moreover, this is happens at a time when resources are being used to build new schools, often on valuable farm land, adding to urban sprawl.

Friends of mine who live in the area have decided to home school their children and that might just be an option that more people take up.  Expect parochial schools to fill in some of the gaps too.

Otherwise, there will be no quick fix for this problem, which in my view is one of the thorniest facing our community. It comes back to the need to attract people back to the core neighbourhoods of the city. It will also require an alliance of Windsor city councillors, school board trustees and administrators who are concerned about the problem, along with some creativity and passion.

I’m a firm believer that the information that governments collect should be available to the public, with a very limited number of exceptions.

Windsor Municipal Shadow posted an interesting article on the subject this week. I feel that it’s an important contribution to this year’s election campaign, so in case you missed it, I thought I’d share it here.

The post discusses the concept of open government initiatives. In their simplest form, they’re about abandoning the old model of information sharing, whereby citizens make requests for information, wait a long time (if they’re lucky enough to get anything) and frequently pay for the privilege.

Under the new model governments take advantage of new technologies to automatically release data online, and users are able to work with it to influence policy debates, get to know their community, determine which investments in municipal infrastructure are justified or even develop analyses that generate business opportunities.  The possibilities are quite staggering.

Windsor, unfortunately, is stuck in the old model. As Windsor Municipal Shadow points out, for example, council agendas are only posted online the Friday before Monday council meetings, and not in a form that permits easy data management.

I will add to that. We have no public record of how councillors voted on particular motions or who declared conflicts of interest, making it very difficult to hold people accountable at election time. Of course, since hardly any councillors posted their policy platforms in the 2006 election, achieving satisfactory accountability is doubly hard. (Alan Halberstadt was a notable exception, please let me know if you’re aware of any others I’ve missed.)

Moreover, simple information that could easily be available online often is not. Take property tax assessments, for example. When a person is trying to purchase a house, he or she has to phone 311 every time they’d like to know the taxes on a possible purchase. Saskatoon residents, on the other hand, can click on a website at any hour and check any properties. Amazing stuff.

So let me leave you with an inspiring example of a Windsorite who used government data to produce something that will inform policy in our community. Recently, Darren Bonnici requested data from the Windsor Police Service concerning traffic accidents in which at least one cyclist was injured in an accident. He paid $50 and received the stats for a 2006 to June 2010 time frame. Then he spent ten hours inputting the data into a google map, with this very informative result.

I’m looking forward to discussing Darren’s accident map at the next meeting of the Windsor Bicycling Committee.

In order to enjoy more creative citizen engagement like this, Windsor should adopt an open-data policy centred on the notion that certain city-collected and managed data should be readily available to anyone, in a “machine-readable” format, without copyright restrictions, patents or other controls on its use.

One of the best things about the changes to Windsor’s municipal ward boundaries is that, in theory, candidates shouldn’t need as much money to mount effective campaigns. Given that the new wards have far fewer voters, a candidate with a sensible policy platform, some record of achievement and the energy to knock on thousands of doors should have a decent shot at winning, even if they’re only able to raise a modest amount of money.

Unfortunately, the fact that Ontario law allows unions and corporations to contribute to candidates for municipal office means that this improvement may be negated on October 26.

Labour leaders and corporate executives are currently able to contribute twice as much money to candidates as the average citizen, since they can give both as individuals and through their union or company.

This money tends to flow to incumbents, making it difficult for newcomers with fresh ideas to break into the system. (I will be the first to admit that labour leaders and corporate execs are not lining up at my door.)

Some interesting research has demonstrated the way that developers have used the current financing regime to significantly influence policy in certain Ontario municipalities, and ultimately, the very shape of those communities.

Quebec and Manitoba have banned corporate and union contributions to candidates for provincial office, as have the feds at their level. The City of Toronto, by virtue of the special legislation that governs it, was able to ban them in December 2009.

Unfortunately, Ontario law currently prevents other municipalities from doing the same.

That hasn’t stopped a growing number of municipal candidates across the province from voluntarily refusing contributions from unions and corporations. And since I’ve gotten into this race with a very strong desire to change the way we do things, I’ve decided to join them.

I’m running to represent the citizens of Ward 3, and I want to be sure that if I’m successful on October 26, I’m beholden only to them.

In the interest of a healthier democracy, I invite Windsor’s other municipal candidates to join this movement too.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to get out once again and knock on doors in Ward 3.  Most campaign textbooks judge the success of door to door canvassing on the basis of how many people a candidate visits per hour, the goal being short, simple 15 second transactions with voters.  By that measure I’ve been failing quite impressively.

My campaign manager, John Stefani, happens to have grown up in the Pelissier and Tecumseh neighbourhood we’ve been visiting recently. He’s also a wealth of local history knowledge, so we constantly find ourselves staring at a beautiful 1920s era home of some sort while he fills me in on the families who have lived there.

When we talk to people about the election campaign, our conversations sometimes take as long as fifteen or twenty minutes.

Last Saturday, we had just such a discussion with a man who happens to live in one of my favourite houses in Windsor. (He’s promised an inside tour in the future and I intend to take him up on it.) He’s had an interesting history himself. He was born in Windsor, spent thirty years living in another part of the country, and then moved back a couple of years ago.

Upon returning he was shocked to see the degree to which Downtown Windsor had changed and we talked at some length about the vibrant retail district that it once was.

Hoping to redirect the conversation to some of the positive things that have been happening in Downtown Windsor, I cited the new Downtown Windsor Farmers’ Market and the creative re-use of the old bus depot as a reason for optimism.

He talked about the building’s significance, not just because so many generations of Windsorites have passed through it, but also because it’s an interesting example of the streamline moderne architectural style. (Underneath the not so appealing retrofitted cladding we see today, of course.)

Here’s a photo from the Bernie Drouillard Collection of what the seventy year old building used to look like.

This brings me to the April 26 Windsor City Council decision concerning the Downtown Residents Association’s (DRA) request to lease the site for the farmers’ market. In light of the fact that most farmers’ markets take about five years to become established, that a consistent geographic location is one of the most important predictors of success and that granting agencies usually require non-profits to have a longer-term lease on a site to qualify for funding, the DRA requested a five year lease.

Unfortunately, Council rejected their request and limited the lease agreement to the 2010 season alone.

As one of the volunteers who helped start the market in 2009 and a vendor coordinator for 2010, the decision was bittersweet.  On the one hand, I’m happy we’ll have a place to host the market again. On the other hand, it’s no secret that the City is keeping its options open to be able to sell the site.

The building is not currently on the heritage list. While it’s possible that somebody could purchase it to refurbish it for some kind of adaptive re-use like a hardware shop or a small grocery store, there is nothing, to my knowledge, to stop a buyer from tearing the building down and adding yet another surface parking lot to the downtown core.

Tourists don’t visit cities for their great parking lots. They do, however, visit cities with interesting urban spaces and unusual architecture. When the debate inevitably arises about what to do with the bus depot, I will argue strenuously for a cost-effective and creative way to preserve it.

Until that time, let’s enjoy this season at the market. Hope to see you there on opening day–Saturday, June 12.